Snow Day

5:00 am

Mon January 7, 2013

Seattleites to truck in snow for snowball fight record attempt

Seattle Center may not be the obvious place for a world record snowball fight, but that's where the Snow Day crew chose.

Russell BerniceFlickr

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A group of Seattle professionals are gearing up this week to try and break the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest snowball fight, and they’re doing it in a place where, typically, there is no snow: Seattle Center.

So how exactly do you get 162,000 pounds of snow into the shadow of the Space Needle? Organizer Neil Bergquist says, you just go to the mountains and get it.

“There will be front loaders loading up the trucks and we’ll have an assembly line. Dump trucks will be coming in, one every ten minutes for about five hours,” Bergquist says.

Bergquist, a director at SURF Incubator in Seattle, says about 30 dump trucks should do the trick. He and his team recruited landowners to “donate” the snow.

“We were driving around some of the back roads around Snoqualmie Pass and just literally would just knock on doors and talk to people. And they were like, I’m sorry, you’re doing what? And I’m able to help you with this?”

Once the snow is trucked to Seattle Center on Saturday Jan. 12, a snow fort and snow castle building competition ensues. It will be followed by the snowball fight, for which Bergquist is hoping to recruit about 6,000 participants. The current world record is held by the Republic of Korea, where 5,387 people participated three years ago.

Bergquist says a Guinness judge will oversee the melee, and participants will wear barcoded bracelets in order to keep it all aboveboard for the record books. The event is for adults only and goggles are being provided, in hopes of heading off injuries and lawsuits. It will be followed by a Pub Crawl.

The event is a benefit for the Boys and Girls Clubs of King County, who will reap all proceeds. It costs $25 to participate, and the fort builders are doing additional fundraising.